Hacking Chinese Characters

Start building your vocabulary of Chinese characters with a continuous and vivid approach that is both fun and easy. In this channel, you will learn to recognize characters/vocabulary with vivid illustrated flashcards. Understanding more than 70% of Chinese Characters can easily allow you to read at an intermediate to advanced level. Simultaneously, these posts will share useful insights into Chinese language and culture. Instead of spending a vast amount of time taking notes, exploring, and summarizing yourself, this channel will do the preparation for you. Follow this channel in order to:

be able to talk about the most common things in your everyday life.

understand how to make vocabulary trees so that you can organize and summarize your knowledge.

read and write at an intermediate-advanced level in your free time.

learn in an entertaining, easy and logical way with many other Dig students.

This channel was created by Oxana a featured writer at Dig Mandarin, as well as a popular blogger. She has great passion for teaching Chinese, and is very creative in her ability to share Chinese characters with learners in a very vivid way. Let’s let her introduce herself!

THE WORDS OF AUTHOR

Hi! My name is Oxana. I have been learning Mandarin Chinese for almost 5 years. I take regular one-on-one classes with professional teachers who are native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. By now I can understand what Chinese people are saying to me and express myself rather fluently, as well as use several Chinese idioms. If I’m speaking well, I might hear: 你的汉语真不错啊! – Nǐ de hàn yǔ zhēn bú cuò a! – Ah, your Chinese is not bad! or 你的发音很好。- Nǐ de fǎ yīn hěn hǎo. – Your pronunciation is good. However, I have a big problem which I suppose might be typical for many Chinese learners: my kouyu (speaking skills) and tingli (listening skills) are far more developed than my writing and reading skills. Most of the time, although I know how to say several a character, I have to use a dictionary to make sure I wrote the proper character. This has brought me to the conclusion that I made a big mistake at the very beginning of my Mandarin language journey: I neglected expanding that knowledge. I underestimated its importance and focused on just learning how to say a single word for something. Later on, I decided I absolutely needed to learn how to read Chinese characters, and now can recognize many hanzi and type them on a computer using the pinyin input. However, I still feel quite helpless if individual familiar Chinese characters construct a larger word I don’t know. So, it is now time for me to work on this! As I go, I’ll create flashcards on a regular basis and share my findings and tips with you. – Oksana Ermolaeva